Collected Poems

by Chuck Guilford

Finishing

Nothing but fragments! Nothing. A chunk of this. A scrap of that. And always having the wrong tools.

Wondering why.

It’s a mouthful of nails. It’s the needle’s eye. It’s that same dumb crowd standing out there gaping while you try to drive the spike through your other hand.

It’s a secondrate job and they know it —our friends, the immovable critics.

Of course it didn’t work. It never does. The surgery. The spinal taps. The chemotherapy. That final gut‑wrenching struggle to stay alive. Reduced to a few feeble gestures.

It can’t be enough.

But my mind is an open grave at the edge of a steep ravine where the curved land falls away in a tangle of roots and branches, and my pen is a strange kind of shovel. I throw all of my weight behind it. I lift all I can bear and hold it here . . . above you.